Libraries in the Twenty‐First Century: Charting New Directions in Information Services

Citation

Henczel, S. (2008), "Libraries in the Twenty‐First Century: Charting New Directions in Information Services", Library Management, Vol. 29 No. 8/9, pp. 824-825. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120810917620

Libraries in the Twenty‐Frst Century is the latest volume (No. 27) in the Topics in Australasian Library and Information Studies which provides refereed works on a diverse range of topics for professional and paraprofessional practitioners and library and information science students. All are written from an Australian perspective.

This volume focuses on the changing nature of libraries, the evolving roles that information professionals are playing in providing information to their clients, and the research that aims to define future direction for the profession.

The book is divided into parts that cover specific library and information agencies (part one); primary client bases and key functions, concerns, issues and changes; functional and operational issues (Part two); and information ethics, the socio‐political environment and LIS education (Part three).

Part one provides case studies of specific library types – public libraries, school libraries, academic libraries, special libraries and national, state and territory libraries. Jones describes public libraries as “places of regular and challenging change” as he lists the growing range of services that public libraries are providing and the increasing importance of the role of the libraries within their communities. He provides a comprehensive overview of the impacts of advancing technology, community expectations, collections size and structure, and the changing nature of cataloguing and processing.

The chapter on school libraries by Herring is a little broader and examines the learning and teaching context of the school library, its mission, standards of operation, the role of the teacher librarian, information literacy and collection development. Herring very usefully contracts the Australian situation with that of the USA and UK which helps contextualize the examples covered.

University and vocational education and training sector libraries are covered together by Oakley and Vaughan who detail aspects of the complex environments in which the libraries operate. Funding models, policy and regulation and quality assurance are covered, as are the changing nature of student populations, teaching and learning, and the ways in which research is supported. The authors provide a short section on academic publishing, which is useful but disappointingly brief as this area is one that will continue to impact higher education libraries, particularly university libraries, for years to come.

Alison O'Connor has the unenviable task of covering special libraries and although she covers law and parliamentary libraries quite well, there are many others that fall into the special library category, such as government libraries, health and medical libraries, and subject‐specific libraries within universities, which unfortunately are not mentioned. A significant proportion of the chapter is devoted to professional and personal competencies of the special librarian, with an emphasis on knowledge of the business and partnership with the clients, however there is no discussion about how these competencies differ from those required for information professionals in other types of libraries – I suspect not very much.

Roxanne Missingham and Jasmine Cameron provide insight into national, state and territory libraries and the ways in which they provide national access to the collections. They cover the legal deposit system that aims to preserve Australia's documentary heritage, cooperative initiatives that have supported the building and preserving of print and digital collections and the leveraging of technology to improve discovery and access.

Part two provides chapters that cover a comprehensive range of topics including the librarian‐client relationship, print and digital information sources (directories, bibliographies, dictionaries, government publications, etc.), collection development and management, and information access (databases, search engines, indexing, vocabulary control, cataloguing and classification, metadata, information architecture), and trends in library technology (integrated library management systems, portals, digital repositories, open source software). The reader would be hard‐pressed to think of a topic relevant to libraries today, which has not been mentioned in this section.

In part three Michael Middleton discusses the evolving roles of the library within their organisations and how these have been impacted by the emergence of an information management role that is broader than that of the library. Karen Anderson describes records services and archives and how they relate to libraries. Stuart Ferguson and Anne Lloyd present a concise chapter on information literacy and the leveraging of corporate knowledge where information literacy in the workplace is contrasted with knowledge management. They introduce topics such as “information value”, “information transfer” and “knowledge generation” and argue that the information professional can be the champion of holistic information literacy activities that enables an organisation to leverage its knowledge for corporate gain.

This section also covers the historical, social, political and cultural perspectives, as well as ethics and law for information practice, the challenges for library managers, and LIS education – all contribute well to setting the scene for the ways in which libraries in Australia are perceived today and the directions that the libraries and the information profession may take into the future.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a broad overview of libraries in Australia, the issues and concerns that are currently shaping their operations and the emerging initiatives that will shape their future direction and that of the profession.